Paola Bergallo
Universidad de Palermo

ABSTRACT: Demands for the protection of social rights, and health rights in particular, have become a distinctive feature of judicialization in Latin American countries, including Argentina. Although a growing number of studies have begun to document the new relationship between the courts and health rights generated after almost two decades of litigation, little is yet empirically known about the struggles undertaken in domestic courts and their consequences beyond the judgments. More specifically, given the scarcity of domestic empirical explorations, much remains to be discovered about legal mobilization experiences and courts’ roles in the adjudication of conflicts regarding the intersection of health policies and rights. My research takes a step toward filling that gap by exploring a set of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological questions that are critical to advancing current debates on health and the role of courts in bringing justice and expanding the rule of law in Argentina. With that aim in mind, the project proceeds in two stages. First, it offers a basic assessment of the context and magnitude of the judicialization of health in the country, relying on multiple secondary sources and descriptive statistics obtained from databases of court decisions and dockets. Second, to complement the broader picture, the project proposes a qualitative study of strands of health rights litigation, offering a process-based observation of diverse patterns of judicialization while helping identify and compare the broader impacts of courts’ roles in adjudicating health rights demands. The narrative studies tell the story of how once-dormant health rights clauses have come to life through the work of litigants, judges, and policy makers. They also shows how, in the process of unleashing health rights, courts have played contradictory roles throughout the nonlinear trajectories of different patterns of judicialization that can be located along a spectrum in which an atomistic and routinized style of judicialization is at one extreme, a bureaucratizing form of judicialization follows, and a cooperative style of judicialization is at the other extreme. Ultimately, throughout these variegated experiences of judicialization, courts’ adjudication of right-to-health claims may have sometimes reinforced ineffective or unequal arrangements, while at other times exhibiting potentially transformative capacities.

Paola Bergallo es abogada, graduada con honores de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). Recibió el título de Maestría en Derecho, LL.M. en la Universidad de Columbia, y los títulos de Magíster en Investigación Sociojurídica, J.S.M. y Doctora en Derecho, J.S.D. en la Universidad de Stanford. Es profesora de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Palermo y la Maestría en Derechos Humanos de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Fue docente invitada en la Univeridad Pompeu Fabra, el Instituto Tecnológico de Mëxico, la Universidad de Puerto Rico y el Programa de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad de Chile. Ha sido becaria de la Fundación Hewlett, la Universidad de Stanford, la Secretaría de Ciencia y Tecnología del Ministerio de Salud de la Nación y el Consejo Noruego de Investigaciones. Se ha desempeñado como profesora en la Universidad de San Andrés y como investigadora en el Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES) y el Centro Interdisciplinario para el Estudio de Políticas Públicas (CIEPP). Ha sido consultora del Fondo de Población de Naciones Unidas (UNFPA), la Organización Panamericana de la Salud (OPS), y el Fondo Nórdico del Banco Mundial. Es integrante del Seminario Latinoamericano de Teoría Constitucional (SELA) y fundadora de la Red Alas, red de académicas de América Latina. Se ha desempeñado como docente e investigadora en temas de derecho a la salud, género y derechos humanos, y estudios sociojurídicos.

Aula "Dr. Ricardo A. Cairoli" (A104)